What You Measure is What You Get.

Einstein :
Not everything that can be counted counts.
And not everything that counts can be counted.

About me.

I know enough to know that at 04.00am it gets dark out on the streets. It has done this for the last twenty odd years, to my knowledge and will probably continue for the forseeable future. At some stage in this ‘future’ I shall retire and probably won’t give a damn if it still gets dark at 04.00am. Until then I shall be out there, somewhere, lurking in the shadows because someone, somewhere will be doing stuff they shouldn’t and then, well then I will introduce myself. In the meanwhile I shall try to remain sane and remember why I joined in the first place and try to ignore all the people who piss me off by making the job more complicated than it should be.

Opinions

Any opinions contained in posts are mine and mine alone. Many of them will not be those of any Police Force, Police Organisation or Police Service around this country. The opinions are based on many years of working within the field of practical operational Police work and reflect the desire to do things with the minimum of interference by way of duplication for the benefit of others who themselves do not do the same job. I recognise that we all perform a wide range of roles and this is essential to make the system work. If you don’t like what you see remember you are only one click on the mouse away from leaving. I accept no responsibility for the comments left by others.

Recent Comments

C.T.C. Constabulary.

A Strategic Community Diversity Partnership.
We are cutting bureaucracy and reducing the recording of target and monitoring related statistics.
Our senior leaders will drive small, economical cars from our fleet surplus to save money to invest in better equipment for our frontline response officers.
We are investing money to reinstate station canteens for the benefits of those 24/7 response officers.
We have a pursuit policy. The message is that if you commit an offence and use a vehicle, we will follow you and stop you if necessary. It is your duty to stop when the lights and sirens are on.
We take account of the findings of the Force questionnaire and are reducing the administration and management levels and returning these officers to frontline response duties.
We insist on a work-life balance.
We have no political masters.
We are implimenting selection processes that take account of an individuals skills and proven abilities for the job. Our senior leaders will have one foot in reality and still possess the operational Policing skills they have long forgotton about and seldom used. All ranks are Police Officers first and specialists second.
We will impliment career development and performance evaluation monitoring of our leaders by those officers who operate under that leadership.
The most important role is that of Constable. All other roles are there to positively support the role and the responsibility of Constable and the duties performed.

Whichendbites

“We trained very hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising. It can be a wonderful method of creating the illusion of progress while creating confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.”......Petronius

Just so.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

Reality.

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Rank V’s Responsibility

Don't confuse your idea of how important you are with the responsibility of your role.

Meetings.

If you had to identify, in one word, why we will never achieve our full potential, Meetings would be that word.

There is always a bigger picture.

When there is no answer to your problem, there is always deflection from the need to justify giving an answer.

Its raining, in fact its raining hard. I find it hard to believe that even the criminal classes could be out and about in this weather. They are, or so the latest crime intel statistics that roll out from the CTCC intel machinery show. The trouble is that they are, as is too often the case, sometimes weeks out of date. This is because the system of collection and duplication that relies on the efforts of those who already have too much to do, deem that the local intelligence on the relevant district get the first bite of the cherry. It is better to have it sent to the district concerned and disseminate out than sendit out to another intel unit and delay disseminate back into the district concerned. That should be common sense.

To justify their arses, the other intelligence units vie for strategic importance and hate the humiliation of being out of date and seeming to be out of touch. They may be able to bully the specialist support units into giving them first refusal but the bulk of the local stuff goes to the local office first. No amount of conference calls and morning prayers will change that.

My liaison is with district as my first port of call to get me the nod and following a chat with the night shift Inspector I find out what the spare response will be doing in the early hours if they are not committed when the rest of the world will be at home in bed.

I think how it could be better if everyone worked together instead of trying to justify their little piece of colour within this bigger picture we seem to hear so much about. It is getting there but slowly and everyone seems to want their own little piece of recognition attached somewhere along the line thus complicating what should be a simple process. We are capable of working out where to direct our efforts when we are not responding to calls.

With the local criminals being forced further afield by the targeted efforts of anyone who is uncommitted, along with the offer from the Inspector of a bottle of something warming to add a little extra incentive, we have pushed them from the small villages and towns around the metropolis back into the bright lights. This has been done over the past few weeks and our intel shows they have returned. The drip feed of this information to the other intel units allows them to operate in a different time dimension and when they prepare their intel for one of the meetings that will decide who is going to be told to do what, it is all to often out of date.

Despite the protestations coming from the intelligence unit that we are not shown as patrolling the right areas, we continue to target the right areas as the most recent information from district dictates. To add to the already heavy burden of statistical form completion, there isalso talk of a dedicated hotline that we have to ring before we finish our duty so we can update those who sit at the comfort of their desk of what we have done and why, if needed, we have not followed their instructions as to where to patrol. I hope that CTCC don’t find the funding from somewhere for this.

An early morning milkman seemed to be awake enough to see some shadowy figures behaving in a manner that he considered to be suspicious and rings it in. The troops begin to make their way in time honoured silent approach that belies the stealth factors of diesel powered district response tactics. Due to what we think we collectively know, I get close and use the covert method of a six footed approach. My two having trouble keeping up with the pace of my four footed companion.

A couple of streets and an underpass away I hear the audible sound on the target premises, call it in, increase my pace accompanied by some extra pulling power and hear the immediate sound of sirens that will reduce the time I need to get closer.

I arrive and begin my next stage. I have a track to where they left their vehicle. I recover their second mode of transport along with the essential tools of their trade.